Athanasius Kircher Biography

The German-born Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (c.
1601–1680) was, in the words of an article reprinted on the
website of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an "inventor,
composer, geographer, geologist, Egyptologist, historian, adventurer,
philosopher, proprietor of one of the first public museums, physicist,
mathematician, naturalist, astronomer, archaeologist, [and] author of
more than 40 published works." It might be easiest to call him,
as did Paula Findlen, the editor of a book of articles about Kircher,
"the last man who knew everything."

Kircher's erudition was vast, but it was dwarfed by his curiosity.
He investigated volcanoes (by having himself lowered into one while it was
erupting), hieroglyphics, infectious organisms, magnetism, the
relationships between languages, astronomy, and biblical scholarship. He

was likely the first scientist to propose the germ theory of disease, and
he invented the magic lantern or refined it from previous models. In
addition to his formal publications, Kircher corresponded voluminously
with learned individuals and religious figures around the world. Perhaps
his posthumous reputation is the most surprising part of Kircher's
saga: despite all his accomplishments, Kircher fell into obscurity after
his death and was mostly forgotten until the last decades of the twentieth
century.

Suffered Accidents in Youth

Kircher, named after the saint whose feast day marked Kircher's
birthday, was born on May 2, 1601 or 1602, in the village of Geisa, near
Fulda in what is now central Germany. His father was a teacher and
lecturer who had studied religion and philosophy. Kircher experienced the
first of several brushes with death when he was accidentally run through
part of a mill apparatus. He attended Jesuit schools, and in 1618 he made
plans to study at the Society of Jesus in the city of Paderborn, a
religious institution with an educational component. Kircher injured one
of his legs in an ice-skating accident prior to his admission, and it
turned gangrenous. He was examined when he arrived at the school, and
doctors told him his condition was incurable. Kircher, however, retired to
a chapel containing a statue of Mary that was reputed to have curative
powers. The next morning, his leg was once again whole.

The chaos of the Thirty Years' War, which tore Germany apart along
religious lines, left its mark on the rest of Kircher's education.
Forced to flee Paderborn along with his teachers, Kircher was stranded on
an ice floe while trying to cross the frozen Rhine River. He swam to shore
and eventually made his way to a Catholic university in Cologne, where he
continued his studies of philosophy, science, and classical languages. He
learned to speak Hebrew and Syriac on his way to mastery of some ten
languages, possibly including Chinese. Kircher was sent to teach
mathematics and languages at Jesuit schools in the cities of Heiligenstadt
and Koblenz, encountering new hazards as he crossed Protestant-held
territory. Captured and nearly hanged at one point, he was spared by a
soldier who was struck by his calmness in the face of death.

Kircher's first influential patron was the Elector of Mainz, who
brought him to that city after hearing reports of Kircher's skill
in mounting a fireworks display. At the Elector's court Kircher
wrote a book,
Ars magnesia
, about magnetism. After the Elector's death Kircher began studying
for the priesthood, making astronomical observations on the side; he was
one of the first astronomers to view sunspots through a telescope. Kircher
was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1628. He embarked on a period of
study and reflection at a Jesuit college in Speyer, finding a book of
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in the college's library and
applying himself to the age-old problem of deciphering them. His guesses
at the meaning of the hieroglyphics were wrong but wildly
original—he thought they constituted a set of religious symbols
rather than a writing system.

Kircher began teaching mathematics, ethics, and ancient languages at the
University of Würzburg. In 1630 he was fascinated by reports of the
eruption of the Mount Vesuvius volcano in Italy. Apparently wanting to
explore the world, he petitioned his superior to be allowed to travel to
China as a missionary, but his application was refused. Kircher was forced
to flee the outbreak of war once again in 1631 as Swedish Protestant
troops invaded the Würzburg region, and this time he had to leave
Germany for good. Arriving in the eastern French city of Avignon, a center
of Catholic learning in France, he began teaching and attracted the
attention of an influential patron, the French nobleman Sicolas Peiresc.
Peiresc had a large collection of Egyptian artifacts and had heard of
Kircher's investigations into their meaning.

Shipwreck Led to Residence in Rome

In Avignon Kircher penned another wide-ranging study covering the
hieroglyphics as well as astronomy and geography. His growing renown had
reached Vienna, Austria, and in 1633 he was summoned there to replace
Johannes Kepler as court mathematician to the Hapsburg dynasty. Peiresc,
distressed by this turn of events, wrote a letter to Pope Urban VIII
asking that the summons be revoked, but Kircher was already en route. This
time he traveled by sea in order to avoid German war zones, but he was
once again plagued by near-fatal bad luck: his ship foundered in high
winds, and he was forced to take refuge in the small Italian seaport of
Cività Vecchia, near Rome. Making his way into the eternal city,
his luck improved. Peiresc's letter had
reached the Vatican, and he was appointed to teach and to continue his
research at the Jesuits' Roman College (now the Pontifical
Gregorian University). He learned the Coptic language of ancient African
Christianity and identified it as a relative of ancient Egyptian.

In 1637 Kircher made another unsuccessful attempt to be posted to China.
Instead he began to travel through southern Italy, studying the volcanoes
of the region and, in 1638, he climbed Mount Vesuvius near Naples and had
himself lowered into its fiery maw. "The whole area was lit up by
the fires," he wrote, as quoted in a
Chronicle of Higher Education
article, "and the glowing sulphur and bitumen [coal] produced an
intolerable vapor. It was just like hell, only lacking the demons to
complete the picture." Kircher eventually synthesized his
investigations of geology into a book called
Mundus subterraneus
, (The Subterranean World, 1665).

As a result of his growing reputation, Kircher was allowed to stop
teaching and devote all his time to pure research. During the 1650s and
1660s he wrote most of his books and made his most noteworthy and unusual
discoveries. They covered an enormous variety of subjects. In 1646 his
Ars magna lucis et umbrae
(The Great Art of Light and Shadows) described the magic lantern, a
forerunner of the slide projector, in detail. The idea of projecting
drawings on glass onto a wall existed before Kircher, but he was the first
to treat the phenomenon rationally. Kircher experimented with clocks and
constructed new musical instruments. He teamed with the sculptor and
designer Gian Lorenzo Bernini in installing the Egyptian obelisk that
still stands at the center of the Piazza Navona in Rome.

He owned a microscope and used it, when plague ravaged Rome in 1656, to
examine the bodily fluids of some of the many plague sufferers under his
care. He saw small organisms in the blood that he thought caused the
disease—an unheard-of idea at the time, but one that evolved into
the modern germ theory of infection (it is not clear exactly what he saw).
Kircher was an early advocate of such measures as quarantine in combating
the plague. He immersed himself in biblical history and devoted one book
(in 1675) to a massive attempt to understand Noah's Ark and the
question of how all the species of animals in the world could have fit on
one boat, however large. His treatise, festooned with diagrams, involved
ingenious speculations as to how some animals, such as insects, might have
arisen spontaneously in the epochs since biblical times.

Indeed, Kircher's varied researches might be seen as part of a
wider effort to understand the entire history of the world according to a
literal biblical viewpoint. However, Kircher may have worked to subvert
that viewpoint as well. His research into the ancient world likely
suggested to him that the biblical account of creation was not literally
true; at one point he wrote out a list of Egyptian kings indicating, as
Sarah Boxer noted in the
New York Times
, "that Egypt existed long before the world was even supposed to
have been created." Yet Kircher was careful not to go too far in
questioning religious orthodoxy. Although he likely realized the truth of
the discovery by Nicolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei that the earth
revolved around the sun, he did not publicly back the idea.

Ideas Challenged by Rationalist Thinkers

That restraint formed part of the reason Kircher's work eventually
fell out of favor. In his day he was an internationally famous figure, his
books in demand all over the Christian world, even in the Western
Hemisphere. The self-taught and erudite Mexican nun and writer Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz was one of his admirers. Kircher's lavishly
illustrated volumes, Paula Findlen told Boxer, were "the first
great coffee-table books," prized by educated readers everywhere.
But by the end of his lifetime new intellectual trends were taking hold,
as the foundation of the individual modern arts and sciences appeared to
make Kircher's "Renaissance man" approach obsolete.
Rationalist figures such as the French philosopher René Descartes
questioned Kircher's ideas.

In his later years Kircher continued to write and to break new ground. In
an age when maps often bore little resemblance to terrestrial reality, he
created a map of China whose shape came close to the actual boundaries of
Chinese dominions. In one book he attempted to create a universal
language. Yet he also seemed to deploy his vast knowledge in playful ways.
In the 1670s he opened the Museum Kircherianum, one of the first public
museums, in which he displayed many of the fruits of his inventiveness. He
made robot-like models, equipping them with speaking tubes so that an
automaton would seem to greet visitors from another room. He built a box
of mirrors that would create a cascade of optical illusions and hopelessly
confuse an unfortunate cat that he would place inside the container.

Kircher died in Rome on November 27, 1680. His heart was buried separately
from the rest of his body. For most of the next three centuries he was
almost unknown except to specialists and Jesuit historians, but the late
twentieth century saw a sharp revival of his reputation. To use
Boxer's words, "His subversiveness, his celebrity, his
technomania, and his bizarre eclecticism" all echoed traits of
contemporary culture. The Museum of Jurassic Culture in Culver City,
California, devoted a large permanent exhibit to Kircher, and a variety of
new books and scholarly conferences have investigated his remarkable
legacy.